Remixing Higher Education-The Open Content University
Jason Cole, Open University

Curent model: access through subsidy, scale with lecture, courses are products, focus on content, web as an add-on. And there’s a huge difficulty to scale this model, to make it grow. Simultaneous curricula are obsolete. Technology is not the issue: innovation is.

One key innovation: the consumer as creator. So, open your course design. If we look at courses enrolment, there’s an obvious “long tail” effect, with Psychology I being far more enroled than Quantum Mechanics. Thus, redesign Top 25 courses. I you can innovate in the head, you can translate it down the tail. Commoditize the big 25 (cheap and effective), personal attention down the tail, monetize research – podcast.

Search is so highlly personal. It is the antithesis of being told or taught, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

How can society afford losing the role of the university as the holder of content and teaching? Well, I have an answer for this: the ultimate destiny of university should be the same one as the one of NGOs: disappear. But not disappear for the sake of it, but just because their goal (poverty elimination, universal knowledge) is accomplished. That surely won’t happen, but this does not mean that the role of the university cannot change to be fitting the actual state of things. If people can contribute more to the commons knowledge and teaching, then the university has to focus on other things, such as creating new one no one is exploring, gathering it, chosing among good and bad knowledge, etc.

A Research Agenda for Open Educational Resources: Summary and Highlights of an On-line Forum
Kim Tucker, CISR/Meraka Institute

I am professor at the School of Law and Political Science of the Open University of Catalonia,
and researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute and the eLearn Center of that university.
I am also the director of the Open Innovation project at Fundació Jaume Bofill.